Skyera, the startup that is bringing the cost of Flash-based storage down by using consumer-grade chips, said it has closed $51.6 million in Series B financing led by Dell Ventures(s dell). The deal, announced on Thursday, included participation from other strategic investors and is Skyera’s second round.

It’s also a huge amount of money, but Skyera is riding a wave of interest in solid state storage, which is both faster and consumes less power than traditional hard drives. But Flash-based SSDs are also more expensive than hard drives on a per gigabyte basis — which has limited their use to places where companies can’t afford not to pay for faster performance.

As my colleague Barb Darrow noted in a profile on Skyera last year, the company brags that it can achieve a $3 per GB cost which is still pricier than a hard drive but less than what Fusion-io(s fio)…

GigaOM Pro analyst Adam Lesser geeked out with Power Assure CTO Clemens Pfeiffer, and came away with three undercover trends that could transform the data center with energy efficiency. You can read the entire post here, but here’s tidbits of the three trends:

Growing up, part of our weekend routine included my mom’s pancakes. My brothers and I loved the way she made them, stacked up high with a pat of butter on top and clear syrup dripping down to the plate. We would watch her cook them, eagerly awaiting the bubbles to form on top, signaling that it was time to flip. We would tease my brother, and laugh about how the dimple on one side of his cheek resembled a bubble on the pancake. Then, we would eat our breakfast, all together as a family, before we were all off in different directions – my parents shuttling my brothers to their Little League games and me to my organ lesson or to the library.